May 29, 2012

Hot news! (You may have to wait a while for the stressed Isthmus website to load.)

"Through his use of Act 10 against the workers in Milwaukee [Barrett] has shown that he is not deserving of support of unions in Wisconsin," says Dan Suárez, a member of the TAA and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UW-Madison. Barrett made use of Walker's collective bargaining restrictions in Act 10 to increase pension and health care contributions for workers employed by the city of Milwaukee. Barrett has said he took those steps to avoid layoffs of public workers.

Without an endorsement, the TAA won't expend any of its volunteer or financial resources on electing Barrett, although individual members are still free to contribute as they wish.

"What this means for the TAA is that the conversation is going to shift back to how to meaningfully and effectively rebuild our membership [instead of wasting] time and money on supporting a candidate who doesn't care about us," says Suárez.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Graeme Zielinski bristles at the suggestion that Democrats aren't committed to defending organized labor. "The attack on collective bargaining was the original sin that sparked this movement," says Zielinksi. "Scott Walker's total dishonesty with the public on the matter of collective bargaining informs every inch of what we do going forward."

But a well-publicized memo (PDF) outlining the Democrats' messaging strategy for the recall election makes little mention of collective bargaining and lays out a range of alternative issues as the recall campaign's focus. In an interview for Mother Jones magazine, Zielinksi defended the strategy, stating, "Collective bargaining isn’t moving people."

36 comments:

Dan Suárez, a member of the TAA and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UW-Madison.

Man, you can just SMELL the earning potential, can't you?

But a well-publicized memo (PDF) outlining the Democrats' messaging strategy for the recall election makes little mention of collective bargaining and lays out a range of alternative issues as the recall campaign's focus. In an interview for Mother Jones magazine, Zielinksi defended the strategy, stating, "Collective bargaining isn’t moving people."

And this proves exactly what the unions would have done without Act 10 -- refused to negotiate increased pension and health insurance contributions resulting in layoffs of the union members with the least seniority. Barrett would not have used Act 10 unless he needed to. Milwaukee Public Schools, whose board signed a new contract extension in the fall to avoid Act 10, had to lay off hundreds when the union, who did not have to bargain due to the extenstion and could not be forced to contribute more under Act 10, refused to renegotiate. That resulted in the layoffs of scool personnel that Barrett avoided in city personnel.

Interesting the GAB predicts presidential turnout of 60-65% for June 5, or about 400-700k more voters than in 2010. Walker is running a desperate looking crime ad on Tom Barrett that you wouldn't think a winning/coasting campaign would be running. Then a GOP group just ran a phone jamming scheme to shut down Tom Barrett's phones.

It's no wonder the public unions are suffering a perception problem. The implication of this statement is that they support a progressive exploitation of taxpayers. Unfortunately, for the unions, the majority of Americans are taxpayers. And Americans in general still prefer a representative form of government in lieu of a bureaucracy composed of civil servants and their representatives directly removing public funds and enjoying other privileges at the expense of the people they serve.

Anyway, the civil servants should get in line with rest of us and vote for redistributive or retributive or whatever change.

Petunia said...Does anyone know what happened to Garage? I'm starting to wonder if he or a loved one has had something awful happen.

As a hard core progressive he is heavily emotionally invested in this election. This is very personal for them. The political stakes are enormous.He and his friends are working hard to find ways to game the system so that Walker loses.Cynical of me? Yes. But I know how liberals act when they think they are backed into a corner.Reason goes out the window.